Car Auction Company Says It's Selling Off John F. Kennedy's Hearse

Many admirers of President John F. Kennedy have tried to walk in his footsteps, but now a car auction company says it has the hearse that drove his body from the hospital to the airport after his assassination. Which means you could ride in his deathmobile, if that’s your kind of macabre thing.

Our benevolent benefactors at Consumer Reports say the Barrett-Jackson car auction company is putting a white 1964 Cadillac Hearse on the block, saying it is the same one that transported JFK from the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas to the city’s Love Field Airport, where Air Force One was waiting to take the president back to Washington, D.C.

The car was purchased by the O’Neal Funeral Home just one month before the assassination in 1963. A former employee of the company says after the hearse dropped off the President and the First Lady, it was just left there until the funeral home director came to find it.

Steve Lichtman of the Professional Car Society (PCS) says that he and other members of PCS are almost 100 percent convinced that the hearse is authentic. That’s very telling, as last year he and the PCS took down Barrett-Jackson’s claim that they had the ambulance that took JFK from Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

The car has changed hands a few times since the O’Neal Funeral Home went out of business in the late 1960s, but Barrett-Jackson says the current owner wants to remain anonymous.

The auction will take place Jan. 15-22 in Scottsdale, Ariz. There is no minimum price to be met.